London Diary: Our man gives the inside scoop on the Olympics

WAS that Del Boy’s American cousin we saw coming out of a yellow Robin Reliant before she ran the 400m?

Runner Deedee Trotter is from Peckham and shares the same surname as comedy character Del Boy Trotter

Share

Get daily updates directly to your inbox

Thank you for subscribing!

Could not subscribe, try again laterInvalid Email

The fabulously-named Deedee Trotter is living near Peckham during the Olympics but has a gripe.

Athletes must negotiate four flights of stairs to do interviews after running around the track at Stratford. Trotter said: “We need an elevator, this is tougher than the race.”

Get yourself down the Nag’s Head tonight, gal, and Del Boy will sell you the one from Nelson Mandela House for a pony.

WHO said there’s a financial crisis in Spain?

Citizens of that fine country are hardly feeling the pinch at the Olympics.

During an interlude at the basketball the MC stuck a microphone under the noses of a group of supporters bedecked in yellow and red.

He asked: “Where are you staying?” only for them to respond: “The Hilton, Park Lane.”

Dear readers, the Great Eastern it is not – and the crowd immediately began to boo and catcall. They decided to look for a bailout of a different kind.

IN TERMS of a ‘white lie,’ this is hardly up there with telling the kids Santa Claus lives in the North Pole (note to Under-10s: he does).

Chinese diver Wu Minxia won her third gold on the 3m springboard and was just out the pool when her parents hit her with a double somersault, revealing two of her grandparents had died. They then added a final twist, her mum has breast cancer.

Wu’s dad said: “It was a white lie. We did not wish to disrupt her training.”

China are top of the medal table, so I think that makes it all right then.

OVER to Team GB House yesterday for an interview with swimmer Michael Jamieson and an official said to a colleague: “We’re off the top of the news for the first time since the Games began, the Americans have landed something on Mars.”

Talk about classless! Hasn’t she read Seb Coe’s script?

She should have said: “The Americans have landed something on a multi-national confectionery manufacturer with whom we don’t have a commercial agreement.”

SPEAKING of Scotland’s latest swimming star, the Japanese scribblers at his press conference after he won silver were hanging on his every word.

But their pens stopped moving when he was asked to name his dad’s former football teams.

The marketing departments at Alloa and Stenhousemuir have work to do to challenge Man United for fans’ affections in the Far East.

VENEZUELAN fencer Ruben Limardo brought a smile to commuters’ faces when he went on the tube wearing his gold medal.

Venezuela President Hugo Chavez wants to award him the country’s highest honour, including a replica of 19th-century independence leader Simon Bolivar’s sword.

You have to wonder if that’s for his sporting exploits – or for having the cojones to display such a valuable trinket on the underground in the first place.